Category Archives: View

View 801 Thursday, December 05, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

Quote of the day:

"Negotiating with Obama is like playing chess with a pigeon.The pigeon knocks over all the pieces, shits on the board and then struts around like it won the game." Vladimir Putin

The Pope has said that unrestricted capitalism is evil, or words to that effect. What His Holiness said is close enough to truth. I have said for many years that unrestricted capitalism leads to the sale of human flesh in the public markets, and I have seen no convincing refutation. It is not that capitalism is evil, or that all capitalists are evil, or that evil is intended.

It is also true that capitalism is the most powerful engine for generating wealth that we know of. That has been clear for a long time, but politicians and regulators must be reminded of that with some frequency. We have also long known that the greed for money is the root of most evil, and that we need reminding of that with some frequency as well.

The Pope also condemned the growing disparity in wealth between rich and poor. This is hardly a new message, nor is it confined to Christian apologists. Aristotle spoke of the merits of rule by the middle class, defined as those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation, and the deficits of rule by those of great wealth have been discussed from classical times to the present. The Pope said nothing particularly new, but then people seldom need educating but often need reminding. The obligations of the wealthy have been known from Biblical times, and for most of the time from then to now have been ignored.

Capitalism generates wealth, and inevitably aggravates the discrepancies between rich and poor. This is obvious to everyone. What is easy to overlook, or dismiss as trickle-down, is the absolute rise in wealth of the poor. When I was born no one had a right to sulfa drugs or penicillin; now these are an entitlement of nearly everyone in what we call the First World, and thanks to Bill Gates and those like him are becoming available to those in what we are pleased to call the developing counties; indeed the only reason we have for using the term developing countries is that the wealthy nations have generated so much wealth – generally through the engines of capitalism – have exported technology to them. Meanwhile, in the United States, the poorest in the land have access to wonders that did not exist when I was young, and few starve. The Christian world has always been under the command to respond if anyone asks for charity (“If anyone ask of thee, give generously”) although many need reminding of that. But that, says the Pope, is not quite enough: to spend one’s life accumulating wealth without attention to one’s responsibilities s to lose one’s reason for being. All may not agree with that, but it is hardly astonishing that a Christian bishop would say it.

To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.

* * *

Money must serve, not rule! The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that the rich must help, respect, and promote the poor. I exhort you to a generous solidarity and to the return of economics and finance to an ethical approach which favors human beings.

Francis Bishop of Rome

I don’t find that an astonishing thing for a Pope to say.

RIP: Nelson Mandela, former President of the Republic of South Africa. The transition from apartheid to integration has not been entirely peaceful, but it never rose to civil war, and if South Africa still has a chance of emerging as a civilized society and nation it is due to him. He could have been a dictator. Instead he was a President.

RIP Lt. Col. T. R. Fehrenbach, AUS Ret. Author of This Kind of War, the best book on the Korean War I know of. I had a sporadic correspondence with him for years, and I count myself one of his admirers. http://www.mysanantonio.com/obituaries/article/T-R-Fehrenbach-made-history-read-like-the-news-5026139.php

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 801 Tuesday, December 03, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article by a Ph.D. candidate named Adrienne Rose Johnson “For the Starving, ‘Eat Local’ Isn’t an Option,’ which points out the day of the local self sufficient community is over, and the way the world feeds itself is through shipping food from vast plantations and feeding ranches all over the world. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303670804579233921148739770

The ‘developed’ world pretty well feeds itself and doesn’t have famines. Local pasturage isn’t particularly green, either: the transportation energy is less than the energy savings from mass production, or so she says and my back of the envelope calculations don’t contradict that. Toward the end of this she says

Hunger is an issue that requires a mature social conscience and political will to look beyond the garden into the global. According to the United Nations World Food Program, 842 million people in the world don’t have enough to eat. Nearly all of these people—827 million—live in developing countries, where 14.3% of the population is undernourished. Some 66 million primary school-age children "attend classes hungry across the developing world, with 23 million in Africa alone," according to the U.N. organization. It calculates that $3.2 billion is needed per year to reach all 66 million of these hungry school-age children.

In this global sense, the often-heard eat-local slogan of "vote with a fork" is well-intentioned but naïve. It doesn’t satisfy our moral obligations as global citizens. If you want to cast a food-related vote, find a candidate talking about global hunger and do it at the ballot box.

What struck me in reading this was the use of the term “developing countries” and “developing world.” I can recall in my graduate political science classes that while the newspapers used terms like “underdeveloped” and “impoverished” and “primitive” and “Unproductive” for such places, it was considered more polite to call them “developing” countries.

I went along with this, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. It may make people in primitive countries feel better to be called ‘developing’ but it doesn’t do much for development. I recall many years ago being interested when the Old Regime of Tubman and his True Whig Party offered a huge chunk of 5°N latitude land to be developed into a space port. His only requirement was that companies that came in to exploit the area build schools for the children of all the workers, and establish some other basic government services and law and order. Liberia at the time was governed by the descendents of freed slaves who had been sent back to Africa to a colony established by the US and was, if slowly, definitely a “developing” country. In 1980 an army sergeant overthrew the government and the country descended into civil war that has only recently ended, and much of the previous development was gone.

At the time – the 1970’s – I studied some of the governments of Africa, most of which were kleptocracies which liked to be called ‘developing’ but all too often the only things developed were overseas bank accounts for the ruling classes. Needless to say it was considered racist to refer to these places as primitive, uncivilized, or even under-developed. ‘Developing’ was the satisfactory word even if there were no visible signs of development.

Development seems largely to consist of transfers of food from productive countries to the ‘developing’ countries. In the old colonial days the theory at least was that tribal societies would become civilized through law and order and education; compulsory education was tried in some places but generally could not be afforded, but there were schools for those who wanted to go to school. As I said earlier, under the True Whig government in Liberia, a condition of foreign investment was that the children of anyone employed in Liberia be given an education and at least nominal – sometimes quite good – medical care. There were often medical technician apprenticeship education facilities as part of the health care program. All that is gone, but the Liberian officials I talked to were well educated and referred to their country as primitive but developing – and they had a definition of developing. They hoped in a few generations to have 75% literacy in the country…

I did manage to interest some investors in a venture to exploit Liberian resources as part of a construction of a space port – there are considerable advantages to a near equatorial launch site, and the region was suitable as a test station for a receiver for space solar power – but all that was wasted when a tribal revolt insisting on one man one vote (which turned out to be once) brought all that to an end, and Liberia went from ‘developing’ to ‘war torn”. At least there hadn’t been a lot of investment yet.

Unlike Ms. Johnson, I am very much in favor of local truck gardens and food production, but that’s really a topic for another time. I had a hydroponics greenhouse in the back yard at Chaos Manor until Hammer made us enough money to afford a swimming pool.

My friend Ron Unz has an odd theory: that raising the minimum wage would allow cutting welfare benefits. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/the-minimum-wage-cure-for-illegal-immigration/ My own view is that minimum wages destroy employment opportunities for the unskilled and inexperienced, and it won’t matter if you raise minimum wages because you’ll never be able to cut entitlements to suit, but Ron is a very intelligent guy and worth listening to. I’ll try to work up an analysis, but I can’t believe Unz will convert me to his view.

caps lock key tone

You said: I was able to go into the accessibility settings and set the tone for CAPS LOCK .

How did you do that, where are the ‘accessibility settings’ ?

thanks

JG

John Galt

Control Panel > Ease of Access Center > Make The Keyboard Easier to Use > Turn on Toggle Keys

It used to be under Accessibility which had a wheelchair icon but that route is gone. Turn on the toggle. Do NOT DO ANYHING ELSE or if you do, write down what you did. The toggle to tone ought to work as soon as applied and needs no reset. When you hit the Caps Lock key a tone sounds. Hit it again and a tone sounds when you turn it off. There are other settings in there, some useful, but beware. There is a way to make the keyboard invisible to the computer after the password is typed in; I don’t know how I did it or how I turned it off, and I am not going to experiment to find out how to do it again.

FYI, obviously not something to post.

You quote Obama as making his transparency statement on January 31, 2009.

I had occasion to quote this today, and I (almost) never quote without attribution. I found the statement explicitly near the end of Obama’s January 21 (twenty-first), 2009 welcoming address to staff. I cannot find it documented as being said on January 31.

Here’s the source:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-welcoming-senior-staff-and-cabinet-secretaries-white-house

Today’s Frank & Ernest cartoon addresses the issue at

http://www.gocomics.com/frankandernest/2013/12/03

Best regards,

Well, I don’t have the location of my source, but there was one, with date, that I considered satisfactory. He has famously said this more than once, and it is not an atypical promise from Mr. Obama. It hasn’t worked out that way. Thanks for the information, but on consideration I do not consider it unfair to leave it up there.

Lamarck and Lysenko

experience modifies genes

hi Jerry,

This article about passing an aversion to smell onto offspring shows some of the first evidence that evolution is not completely random.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25156510

Jeff Marshall

This may be the most important genetic data since the discovery of DNA. It is nothing less than evidence for some of the Lamarckian hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The last important advocate of that was Lysenko. If acquired characteristics can be inherited, then the mechanism of evolution changes dramatically.

We know that social characteristics can be “inherited” in villages – my cocktail party theory of the role dogs played in the evolution of human intelligence is an example, and I only call it a cocktail party theory because I haven’t the time to make a formal investigation and defense of the theory – but that only explains why there have been such rapid developments in humans.

We have certainly not heard the last of this discovery.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 801 Monday, December 02, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

It was a nice Thanksgiving Day at Chaos Manor. Two of the boys, Alex and Frank, were here and we were able with SKYPE to talk to Phillip and two of the grandchildren in Virginia. Friday Alex and I went down to LASCON, and I got to see a lot of old friends. Big panel in the afternoon with me, and Niven, and Greg Benford, and Harry Turtledove, and Betsey Mitchell and I can’t imagine how with that many people anyone had a chance to say much, but I had fun.

Of course I didn’t hear much of what was going on, and I ran into an xcorps rocket mechanic friend who showed me his COSTCO hearing aid. Two thousand dollars and about 17 frequency channels with notching and selective tuning. I am thinking of checking that out. I cannot use broad band hearing aids. It may be that Kaiser and Medicare Advantage have some kind of deal on something similar so I need to look into that, but I am weary of annoying people by making them repeat everything they say, and of not understand three consecutive words of most of what is said to me.

But I had a good time.

Then Saturday I managed the oddest computer glitch I have ever had. In essence my computer would start up, accept the password, and that password was the last information from the keyboard that the machine ever reacted to. Control-Alt-Delete did nothing. The Alt key did not bring up the Firefox tool bar. Windows 7 64 bit worked just fine so long as commands were given with the mouse, but nothing, nothing from the keyboard, except that it had reacted to the typed in password, so it was clearly a Windows setting, not hardware.

Now I had been trying to turn on the tone that sounds when you inevitably hit the Caps Lock key by accident – I’d as soon that key was on a foot pedal, or a key lock switch – and even finding that switch in the Windows 7 control panel requires dedication. It’s somewhere in the accessibility settings, and those aren’t as easy to find as they used to be. But I never got that features turned on. I had it turned on until recently when I did some kind of update possibly to Explorer, which seems to have reset it, and my attempts to reinstate it somehow resulted in the machine deciding not to listen to the keyboard again.

I spent Saturday trying to fix that. I then decided I had better back up my Outlook files while the system was still responding to the mouse. Then I kept fooling around with it all. And kept resetting. And trying again. I brought up Outlook on another machine so I could check my mail. Went back to this machine and – well, somewhere in there I managed to restore the defaults. I had brought up a keyboard that you can use with the mouse (there’s one in there) and that worked and with that on screen I tried other stuff and suddenly when I hit an actual key on the keyboard the on-screen mouse activated keyboard would show the key pressed, and I figured by golly it’s at least listening, so I reset the system and this time when it came up all the problems were solved. Better, I was able to go into the accessibility settings and set the tone for CAPS LOCK and this time that worked without any reset or anything.

Of course I then had Outlook in two places and found I had lost a month of mail and other information, but that was just a question of getting my head in order and finding a backup copy of OUTLOOK.PST, while saving all the mail that had come in on the other machine into a file I could export to, then moving everything back over here, bring up Outlook with an Outlook.pst good to Friday evening, bring in the stuff that had come in on the other machine and integrate all that, and when it was all over I had all my files back, all my records back except two sent messages that didn’t get into the exported files I saved and I won’t bother with them. But there was a bit of panic when I thought I had managed to mismanage my backups to the point of losing everything Outlook had done for a couple of weeks. Which has resulted in a flurry of backups yesterday and today, and not getting much done. So it goes.

And Roberta has banished me to the Monk’s Cell to work on Janissaries, which works because I have a couple of new books on medieval naval warfare that fit with the next scenes I have to write. After which I will try to catch up on MAIL – one of the things I thought I had managed to lose was my selected mail file with inputs on the “do we understand evolution very well” discussion. (That’s how I choose to see it. I have no investment in “believing in evolution” or not believing in it, and I have some faith in science as a means to discover the actual mechanisms of the world. Less faith in scientists in being scientists and not advocates for their theories and beliefs which seem as firm and unshakable as those of the Inquisition; but that’s another story.)

Anyway that’s where I have been for the past few days. A bit of computing at Chaos Manor. It was sort of fun, and we had the happy ending I always insisted on for my column. And now I will go off to work on Janissaries, and maybe I’ll get back on schedule…

And Kaiser tells me how to do the hearing aid deal. I pay 20% of cost, which seems reasonable.

My teen age granddaughter wants a Surface 2 with a pink keyboard. Shopping is crazy today but the most precious commodity here at Chaos Manor is time with some energy, so I am not worried about bargains. But I would appreciate suggestions about accessories that a teen age girl would think were cool. We raised four boys but no girls here so I am not much of an expert on what bright and sane teen age girls find cool. We’ll get the Surface 2 with pink keyboard. But what else is worth considering? I know Griffin makes some really cool stuff for Macs but she wants this since it has Office.

I’ll try to get to mail tonight. And some other stuff.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 800 Tuesday, November 26, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

Dentist appointment today; all is on the proper track. The abscess removed when the old wisdom tooth came out was probably responsible for a lot of my energy losses last year, and it will take a while for the immune system to recover, but that will happen; maybe I’ll get back to some of the levels I used to have. Meanwhile my jaw doesn’t hurt as much as it did, Deo gratia.

My son Frank came in from Texas to spend Thanksgiving, and got in late this evening. Alex came over for a while. Sable was overjoyed. She misses the boys. She went to bed happy.

We have a lot of mail on the evolution discussion. Understand that my position is that I am prepared to accept something like Darwinian evolution and have been since high school; but given the complexity of life and what we have learned since Darwin wrote, I can’t believe that the blind workings of chance took us from the slime to Swan Lake. I have seen, for instance, the model by which light sensitive cells evolved into a socketed eye, and once you have an eye it’s credible that it kept improving by gradual steps, each step making the organism that has it a bit more ‘fit’ than its predecessors; but the early steps of the process don’t do that. If you know where you are going, you can watch for random developments that lead you in that direction, but that isn’t Darwin: Darwinian selection postulates that each step must be an ‘improvement’ over the last, not just a step toward an eye from a light sensitive cell, but a definite improvement over its predecessor causing the improved model to have more survivable offspring.

And overall I have to say with Fred, it’s easier to believe that a cloud of gas by chance turned into San Francisco and danced Swan Lake if you have been smoking Drano.

Hi Jerry,

I read with interest your posting on "Asking Questions about Darwin" (https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=16304). You used an example of evolution involving a bag of watch parts and the probability that shaking said bag would result in a fully functional watch. Or rather, the improbability of such a result without the involvement of an "Intelligent Designer".

I must say, were evolution as complex as you make it out to be, then the most parsimonious answer would be that an intelligent designer was probably involved. However, your analogy is… incorrect…

While you could use a "bag of stuff" as an analogy to describe evolution, the contents of said bag would have to be a lot different than watch parts, although a timekeeping device could reasonably be the outcome of this process.

Please allow me to repeat that. We could indeed get a functional watch out of a bag of parts through a stochastic process… But it requires lots of bags, and a process that sieves the successes of one bag into the next bag.

To bring the analogy in line with what is actually going on in evolution, you would have to start with something simple like the attached image of a child’s toy. Place that in a bag. Shake it around long enough and some of the shapes will make it through to the inside of the sphere. Most will not…

This is the "test", as it were, and it is no more complex than that. The steps are small, and the evaluation process is unambiguous. Nature shakes the bag, the parts change slightly, and we see what survives. Lather, rinse, repeat…

From such humble beginnings, endless levels of complexity can come about as long as it receives energy inputs from the sun.

..Ch:W..

Lots of bags is fine; but sieving the ‘successes’ implies that you know where you are going. That is what we haven’t settled.

Jerry,

The flaw in the evolution-as-watch-assembly analogy is the whole Newtonian dead-matter mistake. The components of a watch have no natural telos to come together (even when shaken vigorously in a box) and must be forced together artificially. The "components" of a natural thing come together naturally (i.e., by their essential natures). For example, shake ethanoyl chloride and ammonia together in a box (reactor) and they will self-assemble into ethanamide and ammonium chloride. And the parts (not "components) of a living thing are not even assembled — they grow out of one another.

The probability argument is bogus for this and other reasons. There is no probability simpliciter; there is only probability-given-a-model. Or as Einstein once told Heisenberg, "theory determines what can be observed." The probability argument typically makes model assumptions about component p’s and independence. So given n components, you get P=p1*p2*p3*…*pn, which can get tolerably small mighty fast as n increases. But the probabilities of the "components" are not independent and the usual STAT 101 methods don’t apply. What’s the probability of a finger? Now take that to the 10th power and see how unlikely your hands are.

It is also the case in nature that what a component does depends on what whole it is a part of. A free electron behaves differently from an electron in a valence orbit. What a gene does depends on what other genes are nearby — and on epigenetic and environmental factors. The helmeted water flea develops its helmet in the presence of chemical markers of a predator fish. Raised in a fish-free tank, cloned populations of the flea do no develop the "helmet." Same genes, different outcome. A Mediterranean wall lizard that lived a carnivorous life on a certain island became a vegetarian when it was transferred to another, plant-bearing island; and within twenty years had developed the organs for digesting the plant matter. What are the odds? Chance may not be at the heart of the matter.

Furthermore, modern genetics is discovering that genetic change can be massive, sudden, and specific, putting the punct in punctuated equilibrium, so to speak. Shapiro at Chicago is big on this. This video shows why few actual working scientists become media stars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06hUABCuXBw&t=37m17s Some of Shapiro’s papers can be found here: http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/

Now the idea that a mid-Victorian country squire hit on the Truth About Everything is remarkable, and biologists could learn a bit from the physicists, who have quite happily abandoned what they thought they knew ca. 1860. There could easily be multiple processes at work in evolution, just as there are in local motion (gravity, electromagnetism, etc. — and we have turned "gravity" inside out since the Widow of Windsor’s day). So the "striving to the utmost" to reproduce coupled with the "struggle for existence" that forms the Darwinian engine may not account for everything in sight — except in the tautological sense that "survivors survive."

Re: design. The idea that the unlikeliness of the outcome is evidence of design would have astonished Thomas Aquinas, whose Fifth Way proceeded from the dependable lawfulness of nature, not from the inexplicable or unlikely. He would have regarded gravitational attraction of a falling stone as every bit as much evidence of design as the intricacies of molecular biology. He even commented on the possibility of new species emerging: "Species, also, that are new, if any such appear, existed beforehand in various active powers; so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning." IOW, new species would come about by some natural process on which he was as unclear as his contemporaries. Replace "putrefaction" with "mutation" and specify the "powers of the elements" as the various genetic processes, and we see that he was lacking in the details.

And Augustine once wrote that when God created, he created "what was to be in times to come."

Mike F

Biodiversity

Jerry,

I’ve never found evolution to be a satisfying explanation for the existence of biodiversity. Natural selection destroys biodiversity, and more importantly, the universe, as best we know it, resolves to a state of maximum uniformity (whatever that looks like). Think of it as entropy in action.

I find God a much more satisfying answer. More precisely, I believe that God is, in a sense, the opposite of entropy.

Instead of resolving to maximum uniformity, God resolves to maximum diversity. Instead of resolving to a state of minimum possible information, God resolves to maximum possible information, intelligence, sentience, and being. I can’t think of anything more worthy of being called God than such an alien entity.

At any rate, the point is diversity. I believe God created life to be infinitely diverse, based upon themes. Each beetle is intended to be a unique variation on a theme of beetles. So too, for canines, felines, bacteria, and all other life.

I think of it as Bach’s Art of the Fugue writ large. It’s not the evolution of the species; it’s the revelation of the species. God is fond of diversity.

With that in mind, I consider plants and animals to be highly-advanced technology. I recall seeing a TV show about a predator that has varying number of offspring based on food availability, and it occurred to me that the creature was deliberately altering the state of the next generation based upon the environment.

What if that were built in, to a much greater degree? I saw a recent proposal that bacteria are "evolving evolvability"

in regards to resistance to antibiotics, and that idea seemed to be dancing around an obvious conclusion: bacteria are deliberately changing themselves to resist antibiotics.

One thing I expect is that the universe will continue to surprise us. It declares a diversity we haven’t exhausted.

Wherever we look, we find something new, and that’s exciting. I’d hate to live in a universe that was bland and uniform.

Finally, I find it interesting that the inversion of the question of diversity is echoed across history:

In a universe of so much diversity, why is there entropy? Why is there pain?

In a universe of so much entropy, why is there diversity? Why is there life?

Good questions, both.

(Yeah, yeah, I know: mention evolution, and the crackpots come out. 🙂

-Philip

Sir Fred and Evolution

Dear Jerry, I hope you are feeling better and your tests reveal nothing serious. Regarding Sir Fred Hoyle’s views on creation, perhaps I do no understand them as well as I ought, but doesn’t he just push back the question rather than answer it? I mean for him, who created the creators. – Anyway have a happy Thanksgiving.

Jim Hickey

Yes, of course he did. But then everyone simply “pushes back” the question of why is there something rather than nothing. Aristotle wondered at all that.

Squaring entropy and evolution —

Dr. Pournelle:

Your [and Fred’s] thoughts on evolution reminded me of a conundrum I’ve been pondering for several years. Perhaps it is my own faulting understanding of the issues, but I’ve been given to understand that entropy always increases.

Now take a step back in evolution to the organic soup ocean way back when. If entropy always increases, how did self-replicating molecules organize themselves and keep evolving? To use your analogy, that random set of watch parts had to shake together just right against the "rules" of the universe as we understand them. There’s a flaw somewhere in our [my] understanding.

Pete Nofel

Here, you haven’t been smoking enough Drano…

Hi Jerry,

I’m sorry to hear you’re under the weather. Get better, please. We need your insights now more than ever and, of course, more Janissaries books, a follow up to The Burning Tower, a sequel to Escape from Hell, and maybe a new Motie book?

I’m writing in response to the Fred on Everything article

(http://fredoneverything.net/BotFly.shtml) you mentioned on 23 November. I really enjoy reading Fred. His comments are almost always interesting and bring up points I hadn’t considered. He doesn’t have the insight you have, but he does make for an interesting read – usually.

I have to take him to task for this article, however. He starts off well – a smart hamster is still a hamster. Humans believe themselves intelligent when, in fact, the universe is more strange than we can begin to imagine. He then devolves into the fallacy of irreducible complexity. In short, humans are not as smart as we think we are yet we are so smart we recognize complexity when we see it. It’s a bit like saying a circle is complex because of that odd number we call pi. Is that really a sign of complexity or is it a sign of our lack of understanding? We start with an assumption – a circle with diameter 1

– and work from there to pi. Anyone who has taken calculus has probably done the infinite series math to produce pi. I’m pretty sure, however, that the sun, as it formed a sphere, did not pull out a calculator and hit the button marked π. Humans need pi to understand circles. Circles don’t need pi to exist. The eye is complex only because even the smartest human is still human. Our inability to explain how things work or came into being says much more about us than it does about whether they are truly complex or just a result of natural processes.

Braxton Cook

I have never said I have a better theory of evolution, only that Darwinian selection by survival of the fittest offspring doesn’t work; or at best needs enormous faith to believe in it. Some things have to happen all at once, yet many of them have no obvious advantage to the offspring, and a few look to be thoroughly disadvantageous. Of course I neither can nor want to forbid you from believing in Darwinian selection as the mechanism that produced Swan Lake, but I don’t and can’t.

Which is probably enough since I have no argument to win; I simply can’t believe that ‘standard’ arguments of the evolutionists. I can accept that Darwinian selection can happen, and perhaps happen often; but I can’t buy the proposition that that’s all there is.

One more topic, and it’s bed time:

Dorothy Sayers on education

I’m a fan of Dorothy Sayers, both as a mystery writer and as an essayist, and I found the essay you pointed at interesting. But I think she may have gotten the medieval curriculum slightly wrong on one point: her description of the quadrivium as focused on content rather than method.

Years ago I encountered a discussion of medieval thought as making a threefold distinction between rhetoric, dialectic, and demonstration. Much more recently, with access to Internet searches, I looked into it further—and found that, like so much medieval, it went back to Aristotle. As Aristotle described it, rhetoric is discourse for people who do not engage in systematic reasoning, or for occasions that don’t readily allow it, such as political campaigns; for deductive reasoning it substitutes enthymeme, and for inductive reasoning it substitutes striking examples. (The unstated premises of enthymeme often amount to "common sense.") Dialectic is systematic reasoning, often in the Socratic mode, about matters of opinion or probability, where more than one thing might be true, and the proper approach is to say, "If A, B, and if B, C; but if A’, B’, and if B’, C’." But demonstration is also systematic reasoning, about things that are definitely known.

We need not, here, worry about philosophical arguments such as Descartes’s evil genius or Hume’s skepticism about causality; "definitely known" can include things like most immediate sensory observation, or well established scientific findings. To Aristotle, demonstration would have been well exemplified by geometry.

Now, in the medieval curriculum, rhetoric appeared under its own name, and dialectic likewise. But demonstration appeared in the form of geometry, and the other subjects of the quadrivium, arithmetic, astronomy, and music (which was mostly the arithmetic of fractions). The quadrivium was taught partly for content, but partly to teach the art of demonstration, the third Aristotelian form of discourse, and thus as training in a method of thinking. Indeed, I’ll bet that when you took plane geometry one of the reasons offered for learning it was that it trained your mind to think logically, which is exactly what the medievals thought it would do.

Perhaps Sayers focused on the content of the quadrivium because its subjects came less easily to her mind than those of the trivium, and thus required her to focus on what was being said more than on how it was arrived at. Or perhaps the method of the quadrivium seemed to her the same as that of the trivium; both after all rely on logic.

I’ve thought that it would be interesting to see a scheme of education that reflected this division, and so I found Sayers’s suggestions quite interesting, even when I didn’t fully agree. Thanks for calling this to my attention.

William H. Stoddard

I will let you and Mike Flynn discuss the finer points of the Trivium and Quadrivium; you both know more about that than I ever will. I’m the classic generalist, who learns a little about everything and tries to put it all together. I can tool up and specialize if I have to – I was once the world’s foremost expert on certain (now obsolete) military hardware because I was the only one with a certified need to know everything on the subject – but mostly I learn less and less about more and more….

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Roland Dobbins

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